I promised a break from my blog posts for a few weeks, but I had to share this gem of genre fun. (My thanks to Sune Auken, who found it and gave it to me.)

The photo above is of a single sheet of paper. One side is blank. One the other side, you see a replica newspaper. It has headlines Extra! Extra! It has photos. It has a weather report--full moon tonight. And it has classifieds. Newspaper genres within a newspaper. 

If you look more closely, though, you see that the text is all the ​Lene quatem name prepenum . . .

You know. Like in the placeholder text for templates. So there we have the placeholder genre stuck inside the newspaper genre.

But wait, there's more.

The Latin filler text is a clue. This isn't a newspaper at all. It's a fish wrapper. A piece of paper that fish mongers wrap fresh fish in when they sell it to you.

You know. Like they used to use newspaper for?

Since we no longer wrap fresh fish in (potentially dirty) newspaper, these clever folks in Denmark have printed fish wrap paper with the likeness of a newspaper, and then they filled the newspaper with template place-saver language. One genre within another genre pretending to be another genre but actually being another genre.

I say actually because this is clearly fish wrap. It may look like something else, but its function, what it does is certain. It wraps fresh fish. It does it in a clever and funny way. But it's still fish wrap. This might be a good example of why I don't want to say that genres equal their forms. Even though lots of genres are signaled by what they look like, with headlines and photos and ads looking like a newspaper, in the end it's what they do that counts.

but oh what fun to play with a genre pretending to be a genre (template language pretending to be real newspaper text) within a genre pretending to be a genre (fish wrap pretending to be a newspaper).

And the fish was delicious!

I'm excited to announce that Scenes of Writing is once again available for purchase! And now it's digital!

Because my co-authors Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi and I were able to get our rights back from the  original publisher, we have been able to make Scenes of Writing available as an ebook (readable on tablets, phones, computers) at a lower price. This is the same as the original paperback version, an annotatable textbook version. If any of you were looking for a copy or considering using it in your classes again, you can find it on Amazon. (Full disclosure--if you click on the image above, I get a few extra cents if you buy a copy ;) (We do still hope to revise it for a new edition, but it won't happen for a while)

We simply wanted Scenes of Writing to be available to people who want it. We're working on a print version, too, so stay tuned.

And our thanks to those of you who have asked about how to get the book. 

I'll be off from this blog for a few weeks while I visit the University of Copenhagen and its great scholars. Until we meet again, I hope each of you has a pleasant summer.

​Amy